Press Release

Few New Zealanders have heard of the Government Communications Security Bureau
(GCSB). Even fewer know what the GCSB does. In fact, the GCSB is New Zealand's largest
and most secret intelligence agency, using state-of-the-art electronics to spy on countries
throughout the Pacific, including friends, neighbours and trading partners.

In this startling new book, the shadowy world of the GCSB is broken open for the first
time. Secret Power exposes, in remarkable detail, the secret workings of this organisation
and the global network of which it is part, and reveals how the demands of this
international intelligence network are put ahead of New Zealand's own political and
economic interests. Geared to serve an alliance with the United States, New Zealand's
spies, for example, failed to warn of the Rainbow Warrior bombing, and proved useless
during the Fiji coup. Secret Power provides compelling arguments for strengthening New
Zealand's independence by leaving that alliance.

Nicky Hager was born in Levin, New Zealand and gained degrees in physics and
philosophy. He has for 20 years been a campaigner and researcher on nuclear, military and
environmental issues.

Press Clipping Nelson Mail, 14 August 1996

Wellington - New Zealand's spying agencies are more of a risk to the country's well-being than any threat they were designed to spy on, says a public policy expert.

Victoria University public policy analyst Cath Wallace said today that spying on Asian
countries with which New Zealand wanted to foster trade was "economic suicide".

A new book called Secret Power, published yesterday, alleged the Government
Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) was involved in a secret Western spy network called
Echelon, and was effectively under the orders of the United States and Britain.

Written by peace activist Nicky Hager, the book said the GCSB actively spied on
neighbours in the Pacific as well as Japan, Southeast Asia, China and Russia - "any country
in fact that the foreign allies (linked through an alliance called Ukusa) ask it to spy on".

Hager said in the book that a main role of GCSB's Waihopai station near Blenheim was
intercepting phone, fax, telex and electronic mail messages to and from the Pacific.

Former prime minister David Lange said in the book's foreword that as prime minister,
and minister in charge of security and intelligence services, he was never told the country
was part of an international electronic spy network.

"It is an outrage that I and other ministers were told so little, and this raises the
question of to whom those concerned saw themselves ultimately answerable," Mr Lange
said.

Ms Wallace, of Victoria University's public policy group, said today New Zealanders
should welcome the book's revelations.

"There are major unresolved issues in the accountability of New Zealand's secret
agencies," she said.

"The GCSB is an outlaw in a literal sense. It is not established by law. Unlike the SIS,
which at least has a statute, the GCSB has no legal limit on its functions.

"The great irony of all this is that the Intelligence and Securities Agencies Act
railroaded through (Parliament) earlier this year was justified on the basis that there might
be unknown parties who wanted to put our international relations and economic well-being
at risk."

It was now plain that those very agencies for which "we were to sacrifice our open
society" were far more of a risk to New Zealand's relations than anything else.

"The spying is probably of considerable potential detriment to New Zealand because it
will alienate countries upon which we are busy staking our economic future, such as Japan,
and to those who otherwise had thought they could trust us, such as the South Pacific
states," Ms Wallace said.

At the hearing on the Intelligence and Security Agencies Bill this year, Prime Minister
Jim Bolger scoffed at those with concerns and said New Zealanders should trust him and
other ministers in charge of covert agencies, she said.

"Either Mr Bolger knew about all this and must take the rap for taking such risks with
our international relations and economy, or he didn't and the critics are right that the
covert agencies are out of control."

In 1991, Mr Bolger told Parliament the GCSB "does not monitor New Zealand's
communications, nor those of New Zealand's friends in the South Pacific".

Questions to Mr Bolger yesterday about the extent of his knowledge of the GCSB's
operations were met with the response that he did not comment on intelligence matters.

NZPA

Craig Potton Publishing is an independent publishing company based in Nelson, New
Zealand. We publish illustrated books of fine quality on a range of subjects by New Zealand
authors and photographers, with a particular interest in New Zealand's wild places and
natural history, and its art and culture.

Foreword by David Lange

Once upon a time life was easy for the intelligence community.

Michael Joseph Savage made a mark in the sands of history with his "where Britain
stands we stand" declaration. It was only right that we saw the world through British eyes
and, when Britain retreated, only sensible that we should go all the way with LBJ as an
Australian Prime Minister (in whose memory a swimming pool in Melbourne was named)
once declared. The Cold War kept us in line and on line.

In the mid-1980s we bucked the system. We may have been ahead of our time on
matters nuclear, but we were out of step with what was called the "Western Alliance". It
took a break with the United States and Britain to make the people of New Zealand aware
that we were part of an international intelligence organisation which had its roots in a
different world order and which could command compliance from us while withholding from
us the benefits of others" intelligence.

Life at the time was full of unpleasant surprises. State-sponsored terrorism was a crime
against humanity as long as it wasn"t being practiced by the allies, when it was studiously
ignored. In the national interest it became necessary to say "ouch" and frown and bear
certain reprisals of our intelligence partners. We even went the length of building a satellite
station at Waihopai. But it was not until I read this book that I had any idea that we had
been committed to an international integrated electronic network.

It was with some apprehension that I learned that Nicky Hager was researching the
activity of our intelligence community. He has long been a pain in the establishment"s
neck. Unfortunately for the establishment, he is engaging, thorough, unthreatening, with a
dangerously ingenuous appearance, and an astonishing number of people have told him
things that I, as Prime Minister in charge of the intelligence services, was never told.

There are also many things with which I am familiar. I couldn"t tell him which was
which. Nor can I tell you. But it is an outrage that I and other ministers were told so little,
and this raises the question of to whom those concerned saw themselves ultimately
answerable.

It also raises the question as to why we persist with the old order of things. New
Zealand doesn"t have much in common with Major"s Britain and probably less with Blair"s
Britain. Are we philosophically in tune with Clinton"s USA? Is he?

Does all of that prejudice our new orientation to Asia?

There will be two responses to this book. One will be to take the easy course of dumping
on Hager. He is quite small and can easily be dumped on. The other will be to challenge the
existing assumptions and to have a rational debate on security and intelligence. I have
always enjoyed taking the easier course but we may have been the poorer for it.

David Lange, Prime Minister of New Zealand 1984-89

Foreword by Jeffery T. Richelson

The world of signals intelligence is one that governments have traditionally tried to keep
hidden from public view. The secrecy attached to it by the United Kingdom and its allies in
the Second World War, particularly codebreaking operations, carried over into the Cold War.
Whether their adversaries were attacking them with weapons or diplomatic strategies, the
concern was the same -- that revelations about methods and successes would lead an
adversary to change codes and ciphers and deny the codebreaker the ability to read the
foe's secret communications.

Another aspect of the Second World War that carried over into the Cold War era was the
close co-operation between five countries -- the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada,
Australia and New Zealand -- formalised with the UKUSA Security Agreement of 1948.
Although the treaty has never been made public, it has become clear that it provided not
only for a division of collection tasks and sharing of the product, but for common
guidelines for the classification and protection of the intelligence collected as well as for
personnel security.

But over the last 50 years, codebreaking has become far more difficult, and often
impossible -- due to the use of computer-based encryption. At the same time, the
interception of unencrypted communications (for example, air-to-ground communications)
and other electronic signals -- particularly radar emanations and missile telemetry -- has
grown dramatically in importance. This expanded role for signals intelligence was made
evident in the construction and operation of a vast network of ground stations spread
across the world, aircraft equipped with intercept antenna patrolling the skies (and
sometimes being shot down), and eventually the launch of eavesdropping satellites. This
activity did not escape the notice of the Soviet Union, which also was busy establishing its
own elaborate network. It also became very evident to outsider observers that signals
intelligence was an important and very expensive part of the Cold War.

That signals intelligence became more noticeable did not, for many years, alter the
attitudes of the authorities about the necessity for strict secrecy. In the United States the
National Security Agency, established in 1952, was officially acknowledged only in 1957. For
years, what were well known to be US operated signals intelligence stations have been
officially described as facilities engaged in the research of 'electronic phenomena' or the
'rapid-relay of communications.' It took the US over 20 years after the Soviet Union
obtained detailed information on a US signals intelligence satellite even to acknowledge the
existence of such satellites. Other nations have been equally reticent -- the very existence
of Canada's Communications Security Establishment was first revealed by the media in
1975.

In recent years some of the UKUSA governments have been somewhat more forthcoming
about signals intelligence sometimes with regard to historical events, sometimes with
respect to organisational structure, and sometimes about some aspects of current
operations. But secrecy is still intense (although no more than in other countries). What the
public does know, it knows largely because of the efforts of industrious researchers who
have collected and analysed obscure documents and media accounts, and interviewed
present and former intelligence officers who can shed light on signals intelligence
operations. These researchers have included Desmond Ball in Australia, James Bamford in
the United States and Duncan Campbell in the United Kingdom.

Nicky Hager's Secret Power earns him a place in that select company. Indeed, he has
produced the most detailed and up-to-date account in existence of the work of any signals
intelligence agency. His expos of the organisation and operations of New Zealand's
Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) is a masterpiece of investigative
reporting and provides a wealth of information.

The reader of Mr Hager's book will learn about not just New Zealand's signals
intelligence activities, but those of its partners. Specifically, the reader will learn about the
origins, the evolution, and internal structure of the GCSB; the Tangimoana and Waihopai
ground stations and their operations; New Zealand's role in the UKUSA alliance, and some
of the signals intelligence operations of the other UKUSA nations. Secret Power also serves
as a fascinating case study of the role of a junior partner in an intelligence alliance.

Some, undoubtedly, will object to the unprecedented detail to be found in the book,
taking the traditional view that secrecy is far more important than public understanding of
how tax dollars are being spent on intelligence. Certainly, revelations that defeat the
purpose of legitimate intelligence activities are unfortunate and waste those tax dollars. But
the UKUSA governments and their intelligence services have been far too slow in
declassifying information that no longer needs to be secret and far too willing to classify
information that need not be restricted. A Canadian newspaper made the point rather
dramatically a few years ago -- after being denied access to a Canadian signals intelligence
facility, the paper promptly purchased on the open market, and published, a satellite
photograph of the facility, and its antenna system, first obtained by a Soviet spy satellite.

There are many individuals within the services who would prefer greater openness, but
they frequently cannot overcome the intense opposition of those preaching the need for
tight secrecy. The internal bureaucratic battle to get information declassified can be a long
and intense one and those opposing disclosure have an advantage -- often they are those in
charge of security, who have developed a mindset which views any revelation as damaging.
In the meantime, the public is kept in the dark. A free press, as manifested in books such
as Mr Hager's, is a large step towards alleviating the problem.

Jeffrey T. Richelson

Alexandria, Virginia

May, 1996

Jeffrey Richelson is a leading authority on United States intelligence agencies and author
of America's Secret Eyes in the Sky, and co-author of The Ties That Bind.

Chapter One: 1984

It was a grumpy Rob Muldoon who walked across from the Beehive building to the
parliamentary chamber on Tuesday, 12 June 1984. After nine years as an increasingly
embattled prime minister, his rule was disintegrating. That morning the Leader of the
Opposition, David Lange, had announced his party's foreign policy: New Zealand would be
made unconditionally nuclear free and the ANZUS Treaty would have to be renegotiated.
Later that day two National Party MPs crossed the floor in Parliament to vote for a Labour
Party-sponsored Nuclear Free New Zealand Bill, almost defeating the government. Two days
later, blaming these anti-nuclear defectors, a visibly intoxicated Muldoon threw in the towel
and called an early general election.

That Tuesday afternoon Muldoon was on his way to the 2.30 pm session of Parliament to
read a prepared ministerial statement about a quite different subject: an obscure agency
called the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB). The GCSB had been set up
secretly under Muldoon seven years earlier and had been quietly growing in size throughout
his reign.

Until just two months before Muldoon's statement the public had never even heard of
the GCSB. Then peace researcher Owen Wilkes publicised the existence of a secret radio
eavesdropping station run by the GCSB at Tangimoana Beach, 150 kilometres north of
Wellington, revealing for the first time that New Zealand was involved in this type of
intelligence collection. Muldoon was delivering the government's reply to the publicity.

The brief statement he read was, and remains, the most information the government
has ever been prepared to release about the GCSB and the Tangimoana station. It
acknowledged that the GCSB was involved in signals intelligence " intercepting the
communications of governments, organisations and individuals in other countries " and
said New Zealand had collected that type of intelligence since the Second World War. It
noted that the GCSB liaised closely with Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the
United States -- the closest the government has ever come to talking about the secret
five-nation signals intelligence alliance of which the GCSB is part. But much of the
statement was designed to mislead.

It said that the Tangimoana station did not monitor "New Zealand's friends in the
South Pacific". The big aerials at the station were right then monitoring nuclear-free
Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, Fiji and all New Zealand's other South Pacific neighbours -- everyone in the South Pacific, in fact, except for the Western intelligence allies and their
territories. Large quantities of telexes and Morse code messages sent by long-distance radio
in the Pacific region were being recorded at Tangimoana and sent to the GCSB in Wellington
for distribution to select public servants and to the four intelligence allies.

The statement also said that Tangimoana "does not come under the direction of any
Government, or external agency, other than the New Zealand Government". In fact, the
communications officers in a secure room within the station were regularly receiving
directions from the overseas allies and sending them back intelligence collected on their
behalf.

As soon as Muldoon sat down, the Leader of the Opposition stood up to respond. Lange,
who five weeks later would be Prime Minister, thanked Muldoon for removing the cause of
suspicion which had surrounded the Tangimoana facility: "In particular, I am grateful that
he has given an absolutely unqualified assurance, which I believe to be of paramount
importance, that the facility is under the full control of the New Zealand Government".

On that same Tuesday one of the GCSB's newest employees left for work from his home
in Khandallah, overlooking Wellington Harbour. He had recently moved into a key position
overseeing the GCSB's policy and planning. After the GCSB director, this would be the most
influential position in determining the GCSB's direction through its most important period
of growth.

Glen Singleton had already made an impression on his colleagues. He was always polite
and sociable, but kept his opinions to himself. Privately, he told work friends that he did
not much like the top people at the GCSB. The other directors at the GCSB, mostly ex-Air
Force, had little in common with his tastes for antiques, paintings and good food.

Arriving at work, Singleton took the lift to the 14th floor of the Freyberg Building
headquarters. He held his magnetic security pass up to the right spot on the heavy wooden
doors and an unseen black box registered that he had arrived and automatically opened
the door.

In 1984 this top floor contained the GCSB's communications centre, its 24-hour link to
its overseas allies, the linguists who translated intercepted messages and some of the
deputy directors. Singleton's office had been positioned next to the director's, with wide
views across the harbour. Staff recall that "he wandered in and out of the director's
office whenever he wanted" and that he "had the director's ear".

One of the many things Lange did not know about the GCSB when he spoke in
Parliament that afternoon, and would never know, even as Prime Minister, was that this new
officer was not under the control of the New Zealand government at all. Paid in American
dollars and living in a house rented for him by the local United States embassy, Singleton
was an employee of an organisation called the National Security Agency (NSA).

The NSA is the United States' largest, most secret and probably most expensive
intelligence organisation. It rings the world with intelligence stations, ships, submarines,
aircraft and satellites that act as the "platforms" for its global electronic spying
operations. It has immense intelligence collecting capabilities. As a remarkable expos, The
Puzzle Palace by James Bamford, shows, the NSA is the big brother of all such intelligence
organisations in the Western world. Its intelligence links with four especially close allies [Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand] are formalised in a highly secret agreement
called UKUSA (pronounced "you-koo-za").

Glen Singleton, still in his early 30s, was on a three-year posting to the GCSB. He had
grown up and been educated in the city of Cleveland in Ohio. After university study in
international relations, he moved to Washington DC to work for the NSA. In late 1984, after
settling in as a foreign officer inside the GCSB, he was formally appointed as the GCSB's
Deputy Director of Policy and Plans. In this role he advised the GCSB director regularly,
directed the work of other GCSB staff and showed overseas visitors around the GCSB. He
visited the United States embassy often, travelled to the Defence Signals Directorate (DSD)
in Melbourne for meetings and received special private communications from his Washington
bosses. Between 1984 and 1987 he would help to make the plans for a period of dramatic
expansion of the GCSB's operations and capabilities. Later he would return to the GCSB,
having left the NSA, and move into another key role.

Having an American inside the GCSB serving as a foreign liaison officer would be one
thing; allowing an officer from another country to direct policy and planning seems
extraordinary.

During his first three years on the NSA posting Singleton hosted 50 or more staff from
the Wellington intelligence organisations to 4 July parties at his home. But outside
intelligence circles, not even the Prime Minister knew of his role. As another former Prime
Minister said about the GCSB: "You don't know what you don't know. The whole thing was
a bit of an act of faith."

Nineteen eighty-four was a special year for the GCSB. The directors of the five UKUSA
agencies meet together once a year to plan and co-ordinate the activities of the global
intelligence alliance. The agencies take turns to host the meeting; this year it was the
GCSB.

Throughout the early 1980s the GCSB had been expanding: more than doubling its staff,
opening the Tangimoana station and, most pleasing to the director, establishing various new
intelligence analysis sections that had given the GCSB more to offer within the alliance.

Five years before, the organisation had been squeezed into a corner of Defence
headquarters. Now the flags of the five nations were out on display to greet the UKUSA
agency heads to the spacious new Freyberg Building headquarters. After a special welcome
for the overseas directors, they met in the 14th floor conference room attached to the
director's office, looking out over the pine-clad Wellington hills and, in the foreground, the
Stars and Stripes fluttering outside the nearby American embassy.

The most important visitor was Lieutenant-General Lincoln D. Faurer, head of the NSA.
With him were Peter Marychurch, head of the British Government Communications
Headquarters (GCHQ), Peter Hunt, head of the Canadian Communications Security
Establishment (CSE), and Tim James, head of the Australian DSD.

Although what was discussed at this meeting is not known, the issues facing the
intelligence alliance were clear. The agenda would have included plans for new computer
and communications systems, which would help to integrate GCSB operations into the NSA-controlled network, and in particular preparations for a new, super-secret global
intelligence system of which New Zealand would be an integral part. It would have been
made clear that, as part of the new global system, the NSA required new signals intelligence
stations in the South Pacific by the end of the decade to intercept satellite
communications. Over the next three years, it would be the job of the GCSB Director, Colin
Hanson, and his Australian counterpart to manoeuvre their governments towards approving
such a project.

The meeting may also have discussed the nuclear-free issue, which was simmering away
as Lange's new Labour government settled into office.

Only a few months later, on 27 February 1985, Lange met a United States State
Department official, William Brown, across the dining table of the New Zealand consul
general's residence in Los Angeles. It was a short and tense meeting.

The nuclear-free issue had come to head in New Zealand. Deciding to follow public
opinion rather than the advice of its officials, the Labour government had refused entry to
the American nuclear-capable warship, USS Buchanan, and now Lange was being read the
list of retaliatory measures that would be imposed by the United States government. These
included cutting many of the military ties between the two countries; in effect the ANZUS
Treaty died that day. And, as part of the reprisals, according to the then Chief of Defence
Staff, Sir Ewan Jamieson, "the flow of information [from the United States], on which the
New Zealand intelligence community was heavily dependent, was terminated".

All the journalists, commentators and "well placed sources" were repeating the same
message. As far as the public knew, all intelligence ties between New Zealand and the United
States were severed.

This was completely untrue. While intelligence from military sources was cut
considerably, most of the intelligence flow from the United States continued uninterrupted.
The United States government wanted other countries to see New Zealand punished for its
nuclear-free policies, but the UKUSA alliance was too valuable to be interrupted by politics.

A few days before Lange's meeting in Los Angeles, the GCSB received a call from its
liaison officer at the NSA's headquarters in Washington DC. Warren Tucker, who had moved
into the position a few weeks before and would later become Director of Operations back at
the GCSB, told the senior GCSB staff that the announcement was coming but reassured
them that his position at the NSA was secure. While other New Zealand diplomatic staff in
Washington were frozen out by their United States government contacts, Tucker was envied
because his position was largely unaffected.

The communications centre (the "commcen") back in the GCSB's Wellington
headquarters was the first place where practical signs of the Los Angeles reprisals were
noticed. Here mostly ex-Navy communications staff worked around the clock maintaining
contact with the four sister agencies.

Every day, hundreds and hundreds of intelligence reports were spat out of the large
sound-proofed printers, more reports than the small Wellington intelligence agencies even
had time to read. In February 1985, the GCSB was receiving reports about the minute
details of the Iran-Iraq War, Soviets in Afghanistan, a weekly list of all the Libyan students
in Britain and a lot of other marginally interesting top secret reports. But there was
nothing, among the screeds of reports on international terrorism, about the French DGSE
agents who were right then on their way to New Zealand to become the first foreign
terrorists in New Zealand's history: blowing up the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior.

Most of the daily flood of overseas reports did not stop. But the communications staff
noticed that the "routing indicators", which show the origin and destination of documents
within the UKUSA system, had been removed from incoming reports. While the public
condemnation of New Zealand's nuclear-free policy by the United States government
increased in pitch, it seems some strategist in Washington decided there should be no
tangible evidence that United States intelligence reports were still arriving in Wellington.
They did not want to take the risk that one of these documents might one day be held up
in public as evidence that the New Zealand had got away with its nuclear-free policy.

Later, when the public debate had cooled, the usual routing indicators quietly
reappeared on the overseas reports. While governments, journalists and the public around
the world were led to believe that United States-New Zealand intelligence ties had been cut,
inside the five-agency network it was mostly business as usual.

The United States military was unsentimental about its decades of alliance links with the
New Zealand armed forces; military exercises, exchanges and other visible links were
completely cut. But New Zealand's involvement in the UKUSA intelligence alliance, first
alluded to in public by Muldoon only nine months before, was too useful to the overseas
allies to be interrupted by a quarrel over nuclear ships.

Notes Chapter 1

1. The meeting was during the second half of 1984, or possibly the start of 1985.

Chapter Two: Hooked up to the spy network: The UKUSA system

Ten years later, on Saturday, 15 January 1994, technicians in satellite earth
stations around the Pacific were busy tuning their equipment to a new satellite. The first of
the new generation of Intelsat 7 series satellites, it had been launched several weeks before,
from the European Kourou air base in French Guyana, and then manoeuvred into position
far out in space above the Equator at 174 degrees east, due north of New Zealand above
Kiribati.

The 20 Intelsat (International Telecommunications Satellite Organisation) satellites that
ring the world above the Equator carry most of the world's satellite-relayed international
phone calls and messages such as faxes, e-mail and telexes. The new satellite, Intelsat 701,
replaced the 10-year-old Intelsat 510 in the same position. The changeover occurred at 10
pm New Zealand time that summer evening.

At the GCSB's station at Waihopai, near Blenheim in the north of the South Island, the
radio officer staff were just as busy that evening, setting their special equipment to
intercept the communications which the technicians in legitimate satellite earth stations
would send and receive via the new satellite. These specially trained radio officers, who
learned their skills at the Tangimoana station, usually work day shifts, but on 15 January
1994 they worked around the clock, tuning the station's receivers to the frequency bands
the GCSB wanted to intercept, selecting the specific channels within each band that would
yield the types of messages sought within the UKUSA network and then testing that the
high-tech intelligence collection system was working smoothly. That satellite changeover
was a very significant event for the Waihopai station and the GCSB. Although it would always
be only a small component of the global network, this was the moment when the station
came into its own.

There have been various guesses and hints over the years about what the Waihopai
station was set up to monitor -- "sources" in one newspaper said foreign warship
movements; a "senior Telecom executive" told another newspaper it was most likely
"other countries" military communications" -- but, outside a small group of intelligence
staff, no one could do more than theorise. Waihopai was established specifically to target
the international satellite traffic carried by Intelsat satellites in the Pacific region and its
target in the mid-1990s is the Intelsat 701 that came into service in January 1994, and is
the primary satellite for the Pacific region.

Intelsat satellites carry most of the satellite traffic of interest to intelligence
organisations in the South Pacific: diplomatic communications between embassies and their
home capitals, all manner of government and military communications, a wide range of
business communications, communications of international organisations and political
organisations and the personal communications of people living throughout the Pacific. The
Intelsat 7 satellites can carry an immense number of communications simultaneously.
Where the previous Intelsat 5s could carry 12,000 individual phone or fax circuits at once,
the Intelsat 7s can carry 90,000. All "written" messages are currently exploited by the
GCSB. The other UKUSA agencies monitor phone calls as well.

The key to interception of satellite communications is powerful computers that search
through these masses of messages for ones of interest. The intercept stations take in
millions of messages intended for the legitimate earth stations served by the satellite and
then use computers to search for pre-programmed addresses and keywords. In this way
they select out manageable numbers (hundreds or thousands) of messages to be searched
through and read by intelligence analysis staff.

Until the Intelsat 701 satellite replaced the older 5 series, all the communications
intercepted at Waihopai could already be got from two existing UKUSA stations covering the
Pacific. But, unlike their predecessors, this new generation of Intelsat 7s had more precise
beams transmitting communications down to the southern hemisphere. The existing
northern hemisphere-based stations were no longer able to pick up all the southern
communications, which is why new stations were required.

Eleven months later, on 3 December 1994, the other old Intelsat satellite above the
Pacific was replaced by Intelsat 703. Since then Waihopai and its sister station in Australia
constructed at the same time have been the main source of southern hemisphere Pacific
satellite communications for the UKUSA network.

Many people are vaguely aware that a lot of spying occurs, maybe even on them, but how
do we judge if it is ubiquitous or not a worry at all? Is someone listening every time we
pick up the telephone? Are all our Internet or fax messages being pored over continuously
by shadowy figures somewhere in a windowless building? There is almost never any solid
information with which to judge what is realistic concern and what is silly paranoia.

What follows explains as precisely as possible -- and for the first time in public -- how
the worldwide system works, just how immense and powerful it is and what it can and
cannot do. The electronic spies are not ubiquitous, but the paranoia is not unfounded.

The global system has a highly secret codename -- ECHELON. It is by far the most
significant system of which the GCSB is a part, and many of the GCSB's daily operations
are based around it. The intelligence agencies will be shocked to see it named and
described for the first time in print. Each station in the ECHELON network has computers
that automatically search through the millions of intercepted messages for ones containing
pre-programmed keywords or fax, telex and e-mail addresses. For the frequencies and
channels selected at a station, every word of every message is automatically searched (they
do not need your specific telephone number or Internet address on the list).

All the different computers in the network are known, within the UKUSA agencies, as the
ECHELON Dictionaries. Computers that can search for keywords have existed since at least
the 1970s, but the ECHELON system has been designed to interconnect all these computers
and allow the stations to function as components of an integrated whole. Before this, the
UKUSA allies did intelligence collection operations for each other, but each agency usually
processed and analysed the intercept from its own stations. Mostly, finished reports rather
than raw intercept were exchanged.

Under the ECHELON system, a particular station's Dictionary computer contains not
only its parent agency's chosen keywords, but also a list for each of the other four
agencies. For example, the Waihopai computer has separate search lists for the NSA, GCHQ,
DSD and CSE in addition to its own. So each station collects all the telephone calls, faxes,
telexes, Internet messages and other electronic communications that its computers have
been pre-programmed to select for all the allies and automatically sends this intelligence
to them. This means that the New Zealand stations are used by the overseas agencies for
their automatic collecting -- while New Zealand does not even know what is being
intercepted from the New Zealand sites for the allies. In return, New Zealand gets tightly
controlled access to a few parts of the system.

When analysts at the agency headquarters in Washington, Ottawa, Cheltenham and
Canberra look through the mass of intercepted satellite communications produced by this
system, it is only in the technical data recorded at the top of each intercept that they can
see whether it was intercepted at Waihopai or at one of the other stations in the network.
Likewise, GCSB staff talk of the other agencies' stations merely as the various "satellite
links" into the integrated system. The GCSB computers, the stations, the headquarters
operations and, indeed, the GCSB itself function almost entirely as components of this
integrated system.

In addition to satellite communications, the ECHELON system covers a range of other
interception activities, described later. All these operations involve collection of
communications intelligence,(1) as opposed to other types of signals intelligence such as
electronic intelligence, which is about the technical characteristics of other countries'
radar and weapon systems.

Interception of international satellite communications began in the early 1970s, only a few
years after the first civilian communications satellites were launched. At this time the
Intelsat satellites, located over the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans, simply beamed all
their messages down to the entire hemisphere within their view.

Throughout the 1970s only two stations were required to monitor all the Intelsat
communications in the world: a GCHQ station in the south-west of England had two dishes,
one each for the Atlantic and Indian Ocean Intelsats, and an NSA station in the western
United States had a single dish covering the Pacific Intelsat.

The English station is at Morwenstow, at the edge of high cliffs above the sea at
Sharpnose Point in Cornwall. Opened in 1972-73, shortly after the introduction of new
Intelsat 4 satellites, the Morwenstow station was a joint British-American venture, set up
using United States-supplied computers and communications equipment, and was located
only 110 kilometres from the legitimate British Telecom satellite station at Goonhilly to the
south. In the 1970s the Goonhilly dishes were inclined identically towards the same Atlantic
and Indian Ocean satellites.(2)

The Pacific Intelsat satellite was targeted by an NSA station built on a high basalt
tableland inside the 100,000-hectare United States Army Yakima Firing Centre, in
Washington State in the north-west United States, 200 kilometres south-west of Seattle.
Also established in the early 1970s, the Yakima Research Station initially consisted of a long
operations building and the single large dish. In 1982, a visiting journalist noted that the
dish was pointing west, out above the Pacific to the third of the three Intelsat positions.(3)

Yakima is located between the Saddle Mountains and Rattlesnake Hills, in a desert of
canyons, dunes and sheer rock cliffs, where the only vegetation is grass. The Army leases
the land to ranchers who herd their cattle in the shadow of the dishes. When visited in
mid-1995 the Yakima station had five dish antennae, three facing westwards over the
Pacific Ocean and two, including the original large 1970s dish, facing eastwards. Besides the
original operations building there were several newer buildings, the largest of them two-storey, concrete and windowless.

Two of the west-facing dishes are targeted on the main Pacific Intelsat satellites; the
Yakima station has been monitoring Pacific Intelsat communications for the NSA ever since
it opened. The orientation of the two east-facing dishes suggests that they may be targeted
on the Atlantic Intelsats, intercepting communications relayed towards North and South
America. One or both may provide the link between the station and the NSA headquarters in
Washington. The fifth dish at the station is smaller than the rest and faces to the west.
Given its size and orientation, it appears to be the UKUSA site for monitoring the Inmarsat-2 satellite that provides mobile satellite communications in the Pacific Ocean area. If so,
this is the station that would, for example, have been monitoring Greenpeace
communications during the nuclear testing protests in the waters around Moruroa Atoll in
1995.

The GCSB has had important links with the Yakima station since 1981, when the GCSB
took over a special, highly secret area of intelligence analysis for the UKUSA network (see
Chapter 6). Telexes intercepted using Yakima's single dish were first sorted by the Yakima
computers, and then subjects allocated to New Zealand were sent to the GCSB for analysis.
The Yakima station had been using Dictionary-type computers for this searching work for
many years before the full ECHELON system was operating.

Between them, the Morwenstow and Yakima stations covered all Intelsat interception
during the 1970s. But a new generation of Intelsat satellites launched from the late 1970s
required a new configuration of spy stations. The Intelsat 4A and 5 series satellites differed
from earlier ones in that they did not transmit only to the whole of the side of the world
within their view; they now also had "east and west hemispheric" beams that transmitted
separately.(4) For example, Intelsat 510, which operated above the Pacific until its
replacement in December 1994, had one "global" beam covering the whole region, but all
the other transmissions went either to the east or to the west Pacific. Yakima was not
within the "footprint" of any hemispheric beams covering Australasia, South East Asia and
East Asia, making interception of these signals difficult or impossible.

These changes to Intelsat design meant that the UKUSA alliance required at least two
new stations to maintain its global coverage. Again the GCHQ provided one and the NSA one.
A new NSA station on the east coast of the United States would cover Atlantic Intelsat
traffic beamed down towards North and South America (Morwenstow covered the eastern
Atlantic), and a GCHQ station in Hong Kong would cover both the western hemisphere of the
Pacific Intelsats and the eastern hemisphere of the Indian Ocean Intelsats.

The site chosen for the new NSA station was hidden in the forested South Fork Valley in
the mountains of West Virginia, about 250 kilometres south-west from Washington DC, on
the edge of the George Washington National Forest, near the small settlement of Sugar
Grove. The site had been used in the 1950s and early 1960s for a failed attempt to spy on
Russian radio communications and radars by means of reflections from the moon. The
current satellite interception station was developed during the late 1970s, when a collection
of new satellite dishes (from 10 to 45 metres in diameter) and the new windowless Raymond
E. Linn Operations Building were constructed. It also incorporated a two-storey
underground operations building already at the site. It started full operations about 1980.(5)

Like Morwenstow and Yakima, Sugar Grove is only 100 kilometres from an international
satellite communications earth station, making it easy to intercept any "spot" beams
directed down to the legitimate stations. In this case it is the Etam earth station, the main
link in the United States with the Intelsat satellites above the Atlantic Ocean.

The other new station, in Hong Kong, was constructed by the GCHQ also in the late
1970s. The station, which has since been dismantled, was perched above the sea on the
south side of Hong Kong Island, across Stanley Bay from the British Stanley Fort military
base and right next to high-rise apartments and luxury housing. In crowded Hong Kong the
station's anonymity was assured simply because there are so many satellite dishes
scattered over the island. What helped to give away this one was the sign, on the entrance
to an exclusive housing enclave across the bay, saying that taking photographs is strictly
forbidden. When one of the Indian guards on the gate was asked why it was forbidden to
take photos of a housing area, he pointed across the bay and said in serious tones,
"Communications facility -- very, very secret".

The Hong Kong station had several satellite dishes and buildings, including a large
windowless concrete building (similar to the ones at Yakima and Sugar Grove) and a
collection of administration and operations buildings running down the hill into the base
from the gates. Intelsat communications intercepted at the station were seen regularly by
GCSB operations staff in Wellington.(6)

When visited in August 1994, the station fitted the requirements of the Intelsat
monitoring network. It had one dish pointing up east towards the Pacific Intelsats, another
towards the Indian Ocean Intelsats and a third, for the station's own communications,
pointing up to a United States Defence Satellite Communications System satellite above the
Pacific. Other dishes had perhaps already been removed. Dismantling of the station began in
1994 -- to ensure it was removed well before the 1997 changeover to Chinese control of
Hong Kong -- and the station's staff left in November that year. News reports said that the
antennae and equipment were being shipped to the DSD-run Shoal Bay station in Northern
Australia, where they would be used for intercepting Chinese communications.

It is not known how the Hong Kong station has been replaced in the global network. One
of the Australian DSD stations -- either Geraldton or Shoal Bay -- may have taken over
some of its work, or it is possible that another north-east Asian UKUSA station moved into
the role. For example, there were developments at the NSA's Misawa station in northern
Japan in
the 1980s that would fit well with the need for expanded Intelsat monitoring.(7)

Throughout the 1980s a series of new dishes was also installed at the Morwenstow
station, to keep up with expansion of the Intelsat network. In 1980 it still required only the
two original dishes, but by the early 1990s it had nine satellite dishes: two inclined towards
the two main Indian Ocean Intelsats, three towards Atlantic Ocean Intelsats, three towards
positions above Europe or the Middle East and one dish covered by a radome.

The Morwenstow, Yakima, Sugar Grove and Hong Kong stations were able to provide
worldwide interception of the international communications carried by Intelsat throughout
the 1980s. The arrangement within the UKUSA alliance was that, while the NSA and GCHQ
ran the four stations, each of the five allies (including the GCSB) had responsibility for
analysing some particular types of the traffic intercepted at these stations.

Then, in the late 1980s, another phase of development occurred. It may have been
prompted by approaching closure of the Hong Kong station, but a more likely explanation is
that, as we have seen, technological advances in the target Intelsat satellites again required
expansion of the network.

Two UKUSA countries were available to provide southern hemisphere coverage: Australia
and New Zealand. One of the new southern hemisphere stations would be the GCSB's
Waihopai station and the other would be at Geraldton in West Australia. (Both stations are
described in detail later.) The new stations were operating by 1994 when the new Intelsat 7s
began to be introduced. Waihopai had opened in 1989, with a single dish, initially covering
one of the older generation of Intelsat satellites.

The positioning of the Geraldton station on Australia's extreme west coast was clearly
to allow it to cover the Indian Ocean Intelsats (they all lie within 60 degrees of the station,
which allows good reception). Geraldton opened in 1993, with four dishes, covering the two
main Indian Ocean Intelsats (at 60 degrees and 63 degrees) and possibly a new Asia-Pacific
Intelsat introduced in 1992. It also covers the second of the two Pacific Intelsats, Intelsat
703.

The logic of the system suggests that, at the same time as the Waihopai and Geraldton
stations were added to the network, a seventh, as yet undiscovered, station may have been
installed in the South Atlantic. This station, probably located on Ascension Island, would
complete the 1990s network by intercepting the Atlantic Intelsats' southern hemisphere
communications.(8)

New GCSB operations staff attend training sessions that cover the ECHELON system, showing
how the GCSB fits into the system and including maps showing the network of UKUSA
stations around the world. The sessions include briefings on the Intelsat and the maritime
Inmarsat satellites -- their locations, how they work, what kinds of communications they
carry and the technical aspects of their vulnerability to spying. This is because these are
primary targets for the UKUSA alliance in the Pacific.

But the interception of communications relayed by Intelsat and Inmarsat is only one
component of the global spying network co-ordinated by the ECHELON system. Other
elements include: radio listening posts, including the GCSB's Tangimoana station;
interception stations targeted on other types of communications satellites; overhead signals
intelligence collectors (spy satellites) like those controlled from the Pine Gap facility in
Australia; and secret facilities that tap directly into land-based telecommunications
networks.

What Waihopai, Morwenstow and the other stations do for satellite communications,
another whole network of intercept stations like Tangimoana, developed since the 1940s,
does for radio.

There are several dozen radio interception stations run by the UKUSA allies and located
throughout the world. Many developed in the early years of the Cold War and, before
satellite communications became widespread in the 1980s, were the main ground signals
intelligence stations targeting Soviet communications. Some stations were also used against
regional targets. In the Pacific, for example, ones with New Zealand staff were used to
target groups and governments opposed by Britain and the United States through a series
of conflicts and wars in South East Asia.

A recent new radio interception station is the Australian DSD station near Bamaga in
northern Queensland, at the tip of Cape York. It was set up in 1988 particularly to monitor
radio communications associated with the conflict between Papua New Guinea and the
secessionist movement in Bougainville.(9) GCSB staff are also aware of Australian intercept
staff posted in the early 1990s to the recently opened Tindal Air Force base in northern
Australia, suggesting that an even newer -- as yet undisclosed -- DSD intercept station may
have been established there.

Most of this network of stations target long-range high frequency (HF) radio. A powerful
HF radio transmitter can transmit right around the world, which is why HF radio has been
a major means of international communications and is still widely used by military forces
and by ships and aircraft. Other stations target short-range communications -- very high
frequency and ultra high frequency radio (VHF and UHF) -- which, among other things, are
used extensively for tactical military communications within a country.

There is a wide variety of these radio interception operations. Some are very large, with
hundreds of staff; others are small -- a few staff hidden inside a foreign embassy bristling
with radio aerials on the roof; others (like the Bamaga station) are unstaffed, with the
signals automatically relayed to other stations. Because of the peculiarities of radio waves,
sometimes stations far from the target can pick up communications that closer ones
cannot.

Each station in this network -- including the GCSB's Tangimoana station -- has a
Dictionary computer like those in the satellite intercept stations. These search and select
from the communications intercepted, in particular radio telexes, which are still widely
used, and make these available to the UKUSA allies through the ECHELON system.

The UKUSA network of HF stations in the Pacific includes the GCSB's Tangimoana
station (and before it one at Waiouru), five or more DSD stations in Australia, a CSE station
in British Columbia, and NSA stations in Hawaii, Alaska, California, Japan, Guam, Kwajalein
and the Philippines. The NSA is currently contracting its network of overseas HF stations as
part of post-Cold War rationalisation. This contraction process includes, in Britain, the
closure of the major Chicksands and Edzell stations.

The next component of the ECHELON system covers interception of a range of satellite
communications not carried by Intelsat. In addition to the six or so UKUSA stations
targeting Intelsat satellites, there are another five or more stations targeting Russian and
other regional communications satellites. These stations are located in Britain, Australia,
Canada, Germany and Japan. All of these stations are part of the ECHELON Dictionary
system. It appears that the GCHQ's Morwenstow station, as well as monitoring Intelsat, also
targets some regional communications satellites.

United States spy satellites, designed to intercept communications from orbit above the
earth, are also likely to be connected into the ECHELON system. These satellites either move
in orbits that criss-cross the earth or, like the Intelsats, sit above the Equator in
geostationary orbit. They have antennae that can scoop up very large quantities of radio
communications from the areas below.

The main ground stations for these satellites, where they feed back the information they
have gathered into the global network, are Pine Gap, run by the CIA near Alice Springs in
central Australia, and the NSA-directed Menwith Hill and Bad Aibling stations, in England
and Germany respectively.(10) These satellites can intercept microwave trunk lines and
short-range communications such as military radios and walkie-talkies. Both of these
transmit only line of sight and so, unlike HF radio, cannot be intercepted from faraway
ground stations.

The final element of the ECHELON system are facilities that tap directly into land-based
telecommunications systems, completing a near total coverage of the world's
communications. Besides satellite and radio, the other main method of transmitting large
quantities of public, business and government communications is a combination of undersea
cables across the oceans and microwave networks over land. Heavy cables, laid across the
seabed between countries, account for a large proportion of the world's international
communications. After they emerge from the water and join land-based microwave
networks, they are very vulnerable to interception.

The microwave networks are made up of chains of microwave towers relaying messages
from hilltop to hilltop (always in line of sight) across
the countryside. These networks shunt large quantities of communications across a country.
Intercepting them gives access to international undersea communications (once they
surface) and to international communication trunk lines across continents. They are also an
obvious target for large-scale interception of domestic communications.

Because the facilities required to intercept radio and satellite communications -- large
aerials and dishes -- are difficult to hide for too long, that network is reasonably well
documented. But all that is required to intercept land-based communication networks is a
building situated along the microwave route or a hidden cable running underground from
the legitimate network. For this reason the worldwide network of facilities to intercept
these communications is still mostly undocumented.

Microwave communications are intercepted in two ways: by ground stations, located near
to and tapping into the microwave routes, and by satellites. Because of the curvature of the
earth, a signals intelligence satellite out in space can even be directly in the line of a
microwave transmission. Although it sounds technically very difficult, microwave
interception from space by United States spy satellites does occur. (11)

A 1994 expos of the Canadian UKUSA agency called Spyworld,(12) co-authored by a
previous staff member, Mike Frost, gave the first insights into how much microwave
interception is done. It described UKUSA "embassy collection" operations, where
sophisticated receivers and processors are secretly transported to their countries' overseas
embassies in diplomatic bags and used to monitor all manner of communications in the
foreign capitals.

Since most countries' microwave networks converge on the capital city, embassy
buildings are an ideal site for microwave interception. Protected by diplomatic privilege,
embassies allow the interception to occur from right within the target country.(13) Frost said
the operations particularly target microwave communications, but also other
communications including car telephones and short-range radio transmissions.

According to Frost, Canadian embassy collection began in 1971 following pressure from
the NSA. The NSA provided the equipment (on indefinite loan), trained the staff, told them
what types of transmissions to look for on particular frequencies and at particular times of
day and gave them a search list of NSA keywords. All the intelligence collected was sent to
the NSA for analysis. The Canadian embassy collection was requested by the NSA to fill gaps
in the United States and British embassy collection operations, which were still occurring in
many capitals around the world when Frost left the CSE in 1990.

Separate sources in Australia have revealed that the DSD also engages in embassy
collection. Leaks in the 1980s described installation of "extraordinarily sophisticated
intercept equipment, known as Reprieve in Australia's High Commission in Port Moresby,
Papua New Guinea and in the embassies in Indonesia and Thailand. The operations are said
to take a whole room of the embassy buildings and to be able to listen to local telephone
calls at will.(14) There is good reason to assume that these operations, too, were prompted by
and supported with equipment and technical advice from the NSA and GCHQ.

Of course, when the microwave route is across one of the UKUSA countries' territory it
is much easier to arrange interception. For example, it is likely that there is a GCHQ
operation intercepting, and feeding through Dictionary computers, all the trans-Atlantic
undersea cable communications that come ashore in Cornwall.

There are also definitely United States and possibly Canadian facilities for this type of
interception. By far the most important of these is the NSA-directed Menwith Hill station in
Britain. With its 22 satellite terminals and over 2 hectares of buildings, Menwith Hill is
undoubtedly the largest station in the UKUSA network. In 1992 some 1200 United States
personnel were based there.(15) British researcher Duncan Campbell has described how
Menwith Hill taps directly into the British Telecom microwave network, which has actually
been designed with several major microwave links converging on an isolated tower
connected underground into the station.(16) The station also intercepts satellite and radio
communications and is a ground station for the electronic eavesdropping satellites. Each of
Menwith Hill's powerful interception and processing systems presumably has its own
Dictionary computers connected into the ECHELON system.

Menwith Hill, sitting in northern England, several thousand kilometres from the Persian
Gulf, was awarded the NSA's Station of the Year prize for 1991 following its role in the Gulf
War. It is a station which affects people throughout the world.

In the early 1980s James Bamford uncovered some information about a worldwide NSA
computer system codenamed Platform which, he wrote, "will tie together fifty-two separate
computer systems used throughout the world. Focal point, or Òhost environmentÓ, for the
massive network will be the NSA headquarters at Fort Meade. Among those included in
Platform will be the British SIGINT organisation, GCHQ. (17)

There is little doubt that Platform is the system that links all the major UKUSA station
computers in the ECHELON system. Because it involves computer-to-computer
communications, the GCSB and perhaps DSD were only able to be integrated into the system
in the 1990s when the intelligence and military organisations in the two countries changed
over to new computer-based communications systems.

The worldwide developments, of which construction of the Waihopai station was part, were
co-ordinated by the NSA as Project P415. Although most of the details remained hidden,
the existence of this highly secret project targeting civilian communications was publicised
in August 1988 in an article by Duncan Campbell. He described how the UKUSA countries
were "soon to embark on a massive, billion-dollar expansion of their global electronic
surveillance system', with "new stations and monitoring centres ... to be built around the
world and a chain of new satellites launched'.

The satellite interception stations reported to be involved in P415 included the NSA's
Menwith Hill station, the GCHQ's Morwenstow and Hong Kong stations and the Waihopai and
Geraldton stations in the South Pacific. Other countries involved, presumably via the NSA,
were said to be Japan, West Germany and, surprisingly, the People's Republic of China.

"Both new and existing surveillance systems are highly computerised," Campbell
explained. "They rely on near total interception of international commercial and satellite
communications in order to locate the telephone and other target messages of target
individuals....(18)

There were two components to the P415 development, the first being the new stations
required to maintain worldwide interception. More striking, though, was the expansion of
the NSA's ECHELON system, which now links all the Dictionary computers of all the
participating countries.

The ECHELON system has created an awesome spying capacity for the United States,
allowing it to monitor continuously most of the world's communications. It is an important
component of its power and influence in the post-Cold War world order, and advances in
computer processing technology continue to increase this capacity.

The NSA pushed for the creation of the system and has the supreme position within it.
It has subsidised the allies by providing the sophisticated computer programmes used in
the system, it undertakes the bulk of the interception operations and, in return, it can be
assumed to have full access to all the allies' capabilities.

Since the ECHELON system was extended to cover New Zealand in the late 1980s, the
GCSB's Waihopai and Tangimoana stations -- and indeed all the British, Canadian and
Australian stations too -- can be seen as elements of a United States system and as serving
that system. The GCSB stations provide some information for New Zealand government
agencies, but the primary logic of these stations is as parts of the global network.

On 2 December 1987, when Prime Minister David Lange announced plans to build the
Waihopai station, he issued a press statement explaining that the station would provide
greater independence in intelligence matters: "For years there has been concern about our
dependence on others for intelligence -- being hooked up to the network of others and all
that implies. This government is committed to standing on its own two feet."

Lange believed the statement. Even as Prime Minister, no one had told him about the
ECHELON Dictionary system and the way that the Waihopai station would fit into it. The
government was not being told the truth by officials about New Zealand's most important
intelligence facility and was not being told at all about ECHELON, New Zealand's most
important tie into the United States intelligence system. The Waihopai station could hardly
have been more "hooked up to the network of others", and to all that is implied by that
connection.

1. The generally accepted definition of communications intelligence is "technical
and intelligence information derived from foreign communications by someone other than
the intended recipient. It does not include foreign press, propaganda or public broadcasts."
It generally refers to external intelligence and so does not usually include governments
spying on their own people.

6. The station may not have been initially targeted on Intelsat. Some photos of the
station taken by Des Ball in June 1983 show the two interception dishes facing directly
skywards, meaning either that they were temporarily not being used or that they were
targeted at that time on satellites above East Asia (in the early 1980s there were no
Intelsats there).

7. A US$29 million project codenamed LADYLOVE at the station, for completion in
mid-1982, involved an "interim deployment" construction of one dish and a "new
operational electronic system" housed initially in equipment vans. A US$21 million "major
new collection and processing complex with associated antenna systems" followed in 1987.

8. Ascension Island is a 20-square kilometre British territory, situated halfway
between Brazil and Angola in the middle of the South Atlantic. It has a major radio
interception station with joint GCHQ/NSA staffing, a base for US anti-submarine Orion
aircraft, six separate radar and optical tracking stations for US strategic missile tests and
its large US-built airfield was the main support base for the Falklands War (Richelson and
Ball, The Ties that Bind, Allen & Unwin, Boston, 1985, pp. 194, 201 and 220; Duncan
Campbell, New Statesman, "Report reveals island base, 21 May 1985).

1. The Waihopai station - part of a super-secret global system called ECHELON -
automatically intercepts satellite communications for the foreign allies. The Labour
government that approved the station was not told about these links. (Photo: Marlborough
Express)

2. One of two dishes at a British spy station in Cornwall that between them
intercepted all Atlantic and Indian Ocean satellite phone and telex until the early 1980s.
(Photo: Duncan Campbell)

3. Six UKUSA stations target the Intelsat satellites used to relay most satellite
phone calls, internet, e-mail, faxes and telexes around the world. They are part of a
network of secret stations and spy satellites which, between them, intercept most of the
communications on the planet.

4. The controversial Pine Gap base in central Australia is a major ground station
for United States electronic spy satellites. It has kept expanding after the Cold War; today
there are 12 "golf balls". It plays a key roll in United States military strategies.

5. Canada's Leitrim station, just north of Ottawa, appears to be used to intercept Latin American satellites.

These pages brought to you by Floating Point, Rembert Oldenboom, The Netherlands
E-mail: rembert@euronet.nl